


Siren Song - Gendry Waters

by merrylulu



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Murder, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2020-06-22 10:43:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19665835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merrylulu/pseuds/merrylulu
Summary: Gendry finds himself in a bit of a bind





	Siren Song - Gendry Waters

He's certain he can spot the exact time in his life where his luck took a turn. When the gods and all their friends showed him their backs.

It was the moment his tavern wench of a mother pushed him from between her thighs. Some few years later, before he was old enough to really understand, she breathed her last, dusting her hands clean of the bundle of misfortune even she knew she had just brought into the world.

He often says there's not a worse fate in the world than that of a basterd. And it's only in that moment, as he sits on the ground of that cell strewn with dirt, straw and who knows what else, that he knows he's never been more right about anything else in his entire life.

Gendry is convinced he's the unluckiest bloke in all of Westeros and the lands that lie beyond. To say as much, he thinks, can't be a stretch. Every basterd little boy dreams of meeting the fellow that spawned him. Few do and time and again, they live to regret it if said fellow just so happens to wear fancy shoes and breeches, and spend his afternoons sipping cordial from the solar of his ancestral castle, fucking servant girls and whores when he develops the urge. When that fellow is lord of something or the other, and in order to preserve his honor, orders his armed men to take care of the problems he begat.

Gendry had such dreams too, when he was much younger and much stupider. Some may argue they've yet to see proof that in his early twenties, he isn't as dumb as a bag of hammers anymore, and they wouldn't necessarily be wrong.

But if there's one thing he knows, one thing at all, it's that highborns, those wretched few lucky enough to be birthed on silken sheets with golden quills between their lips, are not to be trusted. Not for the tiniest, shortest breath. He just wishes he'd remembered that three days ago, when he was sold to the woman in red by that treacherous band of blockheads. When they voyaged on Blackwater Bay, and she whispered in his ear until she was blue in the face of his uncle Stannis Baratheon, and how he was so much looking forward to being reunited with his dearly departed younger brother's progeny.

Had he known then what he knows now...had he known the truth of their intentions and foresaw what terrors they would inflict on him... .

Gendry is no killer--until that's just what he needs to be. He would have taken the throat of the woman in red and yanked to the side until he heard that telltale pop. He would have taken a torch to the ship on which they sailed and gladly stood at the deck as they all sunk to the bottom of the sea.

A death on his own terms would be sweeter than this misery. This waiting without end in a decrepit dungeon on a faraway island.

Those people, the woman in red and Stannis, hold his life in the cupped palms of their hands as they would a drop of water. Slipped this way and that on a whim, and the drop drips through their fingers. His life ends as quickly as it began. And none would be the wiser. None would care.

After all, what's the life of a basterd little boy worth, anyway?

"You're only ever this quiet when you're waist-deep into feeling sorry for yourself." The voice slides through the metal bars of her cell, past the wall of blocked lime separating them, and into Gendry's prison to remind him at once to buckle down and stop his whiny line of thinking, and that even in the worst situation he's ever been in in, he's not entirely alone.

There may be none on this side of the world with luck as bad as his, but Gendry's never met a woman that's seen only half of what his mysterious cellmate has.

All her stories of her wanderings across the seven kingdoms, her escape from a land called Essos, where her home was besieged upon and she and her family were forced to flee lest they be enslaved along with the rest of her village, brought tears to Gendry's eyes he was thankful to whatever powers were at work that she couldn't see him shed. Not for shame that she'd take one look at his tear-tracked face and instantly think less of him, no. She spoke of the things she'd witnessed and endured with the grace of a harp-toting bard. As though narrating the life of some else, someone far away. As though pity and tears weren't necessary.

The first time they shared tales of their lives, it was well into the night, after the red woman had seduced him, put leeches all over him and had him kept in the dungeons of Dragonstone, below the castle. Gendry, shaken and distraught, scared out of his wits and still scratching at the spots on his chest were those nasty, slimy fucks had bitten into him, had curled up on the urine-smelling straw cot in one corner of the cell and cursed himself. Cursed the gods. Cursed the father he never knew and the mother dumb enough to fall for his wink and his prestige. And he had trembled, half from the cold and from his fear.

Then he heard her voice. Soft and dry. Even and accented. Beguiling. Young, like he.

"I can hear your shivering as if you were seated right next to me, love," she said. There was a sound on the wall between them, as if she put her palm up to it as she spoke. As if she were touching him. "Poor thing. Poor, poor, thing. My dear, what have they done to you?"

Once already he fell victim to a woman's sweet voice and sensuous charm that night. He had enough space in his animated cursing to swear he'd never do so again. But her voice. That voice wrapped around him like a woolen scarf warding against the cold, and the fear that the red woman and her leeches would once again come for him as soon as he closed his eyes to sleep. It also helped that she called him love. No one had ever called him love. And in that moment of vulnerability, he'd have stolen and given any amount of coppers and golden pieces to again hear her call him her dear in the lustrous cadence of her voice.

He told her next to everything. About the Brotherhood that had accepted him as one of their own and sold him away all in the same breath. The people that he left behind when he was taken; feisty little Arya and pliable Hotpie.

He recounted the sailing to Dragonstone, of the encounter with his uncle. Though he left out the utter disappointment that rocked his core when Stannis looked him in the eye and Gendry had known all the man would ever see was a street urchin. Some gamin not worth the time of day or night.

Glossing over exactly what happened with the red woman and the leeches, he ended his tale with a summary of his trip with the guardsmen to the dungeons and only then did he take a breath. And then she asked for his name.

"Gendry, milady."

"Baratheon is your father's name, no? Why not Baratheon?"

"Basterds never take their father's name, milady. Not until they're recognized as legitimate children by the decree of a king. That little shite Joffrey's not signed anything, so here we are."

She hummed, then laughed. A tinkling bell of a chuckle, as smooth and rich with elegance as her voice. Gendry instantly felt lighter at hearing it. Blessed, almost. Like it was an honor he had no idea she bestowed upon him. "You've a right name, love. It suits the sound of you. But you're wrong for calling me lady. I'm no one's superior."

"But you sound so...you know."

"I do know. Learning to speak proper was part of my education at the House of Night."

"House of Night?" Gendry sat up. "What's that?"

The House of the Night was a temple carved out of the side of a great mountain somewhere beyond the Wall in the North. The floors were made of flattened, even snow and the wraparound steps after the marble pillars were obsidian--dragon glass. As it should be. The horrors that lay beyond the Wall knew and cared not of invitations and the grace of permission before entering a building. They only saw the spark of life and craved to have it extinguished. And it isn't like those who resided in the temple sought to directly correct them of their notion.

They served the Mistress of the Night, she said. The antithesis to the god the red woman bowed her head to, the Lord of Light. His cellmate, a girl of twenty and one, found a home in the halls of the House of Night at the tender age of six summers, when she and her sisters fled to Castle Black and were forced out of their keep into the unforgiving, unwelcoming blizzard.

"We travelled for a dozen nights in that cold," she whispered. "My sisters, all four of them, hadn't lasted for half of them."

Gendry heard scratching on the opposite side of the wall on which he rested his head. Her fingernails dragging down the dried mortar between the bricks. He shivered as he imagined those nails raking down his bare shoulders, down his chest, trailing until they roamed past the ridges on his abdomen to his--blinking, he pursed his lips. The thought came unbidden, suddenly, and a trickle of shame mixed with sweat trailed down the small of his back. This was no time at all to be thinking thoughts of that vein.

It was a sad tale, hers, and told in that lyrical, subdued tone of hers made it all the more morose. But, surprising even himself, hearing it made Gendry feel a tinge of camaraderie with the foreign girl. Like here at last was a soul with whom he could mope and mourn the injustices of the world. With whom he could curse and scorn the names of the fortunate few, whose lives were only made better due to the circumstance of their birth.

He felt... completed. And for the first time that night, the heat of the lit torches hanging in sconces in the hallway outside of their line of cells touched his chilled, freezing skin, and he was warm. 

"Seven hells," he swore. "But you made it, didn't you? To the Temple?"

In the slight lilt of her voice, he heard a tiny smile. She shifted on her straw bed, like she too was sitting up now. There was a pause in her scratching. "Aye, I made it. For I was chosen, you see, out of all my sisters and all my family that fled across the Narrow Sea to the North. I was chosen by the Mistress of Night, the First and Final Champion of Death.

"I alone in our group understood there was a chance we all may die on our venture, and I embraced it. The ebbing of life. The surrender to a force greater than that of your own, as natural as the setting and rising of the sun. The great gift of death, pure as the first sheet of snow. I learned about its importance in that Temple, and I learned of the mistress. They gave me a home. A purpose. A divine mission."

Honestly, she sounded like the zealots he encountered in Flea Bottom, the ones that swarmed the town square, a mist of flies and spouted all sorts of rubbish about the Seven and the like. He and other children that lived in the area often made a game of pelting the preachers with pebbles slung from their slingshots, and scores would be awarded according to how loudly the men howled in pain. Though her words and the reverence she spoke them with earned from him a raised eyebrow, he resolved to listen to more of her tale, as it was the fair thing to do.

They had opposing views on religion, and butted heads concerning it. But that was all. On the subject of everything else, they locked hands.

Ale? To be drunk in moderation. Until one needed to forget something, or one's soul needed sedation, then the drink was welcomed in overflowing quantities. Silk was for ninnies, and the real, callous-handed man and woman wore cotton and linen, working clothes. The upper-class and thoroughbred? Pains in the arses of everyone that wasn't them.

She could attest to that fact firsthand.

She and a band of missionaries came north of the Wall with a scouting group of the men of the Night's Watch twice a year to spread their gospel. Many a time, her brethren and she encountered the likes of the elite, and many a time, said encounters left a bad taste on the back of her tongue. It was during one such of these travels to the seven kingdoms that she locked eyes with the red woman somewhere in the North, near where he himself had been taken. She found herself shackled and on the back of a wagon, on her way to Dragonstone.

Gendry thought he hated the red woman. His cellmate, lovely and naive as she sometimes sounded, habitually spat upon the mere mention of the woman and all that she stood for with a fierceness seemingly hot enough to keep her temperate against the spray of sea water outside the one window in each of the cells facing the oceanside.

"That witch serves the False Lord." His cellmate snarled, deep and throaty, and Gendry's head reared back at the sound of it. "The Lord of Light, he calls himself. Ha! A fallacy cooked up by the scared and the soft-hearted to guard themselves away from the truth of death. The finality of it. And their Prince Who Was Promised? Their great savior? A joke."

"Is that why you too were taken? Because you told the red woman she and her god could go choke on a cock?"

"Something like that. She saw me and knew what I was. Whom I served. She knows she can't curtail what is to come. None of them can. I can't be killed by any small method, and I reckon she means to have me quenched before I can stop her plans. She only needs to figure out how."

"What a wicked cunt."

"Well, you of all people would know just how wicked her cunt is, now, wouldn't you?"

A guffaw leapt from Gendry's throat before he could quell it. They shared a laugh loud and long, muffled underneath the crashing tides of the ocean.

Sobering, he asked, "What about your priest buddies? They just left you to be taken prisoner?"

"Death is natural, my dear Gendry. Death is what awaits us all, in the end. You can't run from it, and you can't fight it. You shouldn't. If this is my fate, if this is where it ends for me, I'm ready to serve the Mistress until my final breath." She sighed, and her voice sounded faraway. Already gone from him. Already dead. "I'm not scared anymore. I've always been ready."

Gendry swore right then and there that a knife to her throat, or a final glance at the board on a gallows, or whatever else they planned to do to her would never happen so long as he still lived. He'd get her out of here. He'd get them both out, and they'd sail away and away to somewhere no one would ever be able to hurt them again. And when they were safe and settled, she'd tell him all about the things she'd seen beyond the Wall and he'd show her all his bladesmithing techniques. And they'd live. And they'd be happy.

Together.

So when Ser Davos came on the fourth night with a ring of keys in one hand and a torch in the other, and he freed Gendry from his cell and told him to hike up his skirts and run away from here until he could run no more, he stopped the old man whom he'd come to see as not a hindrance but a helper and asked to borrow that ring of keys for a second more.

She was standing when he came to unlock her bars. Standing and smiling, as though this was something she saw and was finally happy to see come to fruition. And what a glorious smile it is. What a glorious girl she is.

She's got brown skin the darkest he's seen in his whole life, and a round head topped with coarse black hair, cut short nearly down to the skin. She's small, stout. With a plump stomach, and fleshy arms and thighs. Of course he notices her thighs. Well, they are rather eye-catching.

She has on a simple, unimpressive brown tunic over milk-colored breeches and black boots. The only other girl he's ever seen in breeches is Arya, the boy-who-is-truly-a-girl. This woman before him, with her generous curves and gracious set of her face--there isn't anything masculine about her. If anything, the breeches only help to outline her allure. It's all Gendry can do to not rush her.

"What are you called?" He says to her, yanking out the key from the lock and ignoring Ser Davos's insistence that they be quick about their escape. Drinking all of her in, he only now realizes he never actually asked her name, and she never actually offered it.

"Sa'an the Lysene." She steps out and joins him and Ser Davos in their sprint down the halls and out of the dungeons.

"Seven bessings to you, Sa'an the Lysene. That old fart over there is Ser Davos, the man that came to see me while you slept. And my name is Gendry. Not--"

"Baratheon. Just Gendry." She smiles. The biting air of the sea whips at her tunic, sending the hem flying, and sand stings Gendry's eyes, but she smiles. And it's lovely, just like the rest of her. "I remember, love."

He grins. Then the smile slips from his face when he notices she's stopped walking. That only he and Davos trudge through the muck of sand and seawater toward the shore line, where a boat lays hidden from view behind an outcrop of rocks as high as a man.

She's paused beside the mouth of the dungeon's exit, and he thought she did it to catch her breath so she could reply him. But she just settles there, watching as they leave. Making no move to join them. To join him.

By this time, Gendry stands in the middle of the beach, a solitary ghost, and Ser Davos too has frozen in his ministrations, preparing the boat. He gapes at Gendry and the short, dark-skinned girl the boy stares after like a lonesome, lovesick pup.

Putting out his torch in the water so those above in the council quarters won't look down, catch them in the act and descend upon their heads, Davos plants the soaked torch in the sand beside the boat and scatters as best he can over the wet sand. He tries to yank Gendry by the sleeve of his shirt once. Twice. To no avail. He's as solid as the stones lining that beach.

Davos's concern is the basterd boy whom he's come to know and empathize with. In whom he sees his own deceased son, a chance to help a young boy where he'd failed his. That girl. That girl, with the cold, black eyes; he doesn't know her and has no desire to.

He was there the day Melisandre ordered the girl be put in chains. He, her, and six of Stannis's men had gone east of King's Landing, in search of the boy with king's blood, in search of Gendry, when they came upon the girl and her people.

She and Melisandre shared a look so charged with power, so sharp in its intensity, he and the soldiers gave them both a wide berth. After a breath or so, the red priestess lifted a shaking finger and declared in the roughest voice Davos has ever heard from her that the girl with dark brown skin be shackled this instant. The girl's people scattered this way and that. Not she. She simply stood and allowed herself to be captured. At peace, almost, as though things were going according to a plan only she was privy to. Now here she was, this dead-eyed, suspiciously serene young girl. And somehow, she has ensnared Gendry in the few days they've been imprisoned together.

Something does not sit well in Davos's soul, and he tries with all his might to get the boy in the boat, with or without his new bosom buddy.

Before Davos can pull at him again, Gendry darts over the beach and runs up to where the girl waits and watches him. He says to her, "Davos has got us a boat. We'll sail anywhere we want--as long as it's away from here. Come now, before they notice we're gone."

"You go on," she says. "I cannot leave. Not just yet."

"What in the seven bloody hells are you on about? We've got to go. Come on." He makes an attempt to take her hand, and she slips to the side, so fast he doesn't see her move. Were it not that she starts speaking again from his right, Gendry would have lost her totally to the darkness of the hidden alcove.

"I have something I have to do before I can go. My divine mission, you see. This place, with these people. This is it, Gendry. They are my mission."

"You're not making any sense." He cries. From the depths of the pitch black, a small hand snakes out to run its lithe fingers over the crest of his cheekbone. Long nails drag along his stubble, slithering down to his lower lip in a gentle caress. He shakes all over, and desire births in his chest and suffuses throughout his body until he's tingling with it. He knows in that moment he'll do anything she tells him to. Even go back to the boat and wait for her while she completes this divine mission of hers.

Which is exactly what he does, despite Ser Davos's complaints.

Sa'an the Lysene abandons the tangy, salty air of the beach for the dank, rottenness of the dungeons corridors, a sprint in her step and a righteous will filling her steadily thundering heart. She dashes through wrought iron gates barring the dungeon from the rest of the castle, melds with the shadows in the hallways and flies up flights of steps, unseen. Under the authority of the First and Finally Champion against the parasitic threat of stubborn life, an unobstructed path to the subject of her mission is her holy right. Under the authority of the Mistress of the Night, she is entitled to the quickest and clearest-cut route to the throat of the Azor Ahai, so that she may slit it and usher in the reign of the Long Night.

She's waited over a decade, Sa'an has, to earn enough merits in her training and studies. And when she was finally ready, finally a master of the subtle art of silent killing, when the Temple had taught her everything she needed to know, she journeyed with the other pedagogues into the civilised world north of the Wall. Where it would be their life-long mission to find and slay the fabled Prince Or Princess that Was Promised, the person that is said to be the one to quell the force of death and contend for the force of peace.

Under the guise of intending to preach to the masses, Sa'an and six others departed with the men of the Night's Watch past the Wall. All the way in King's Landing, and in a northern marketstead, Sa'an saw her. A red priestess. A servant to the False Lord. A challenger.

An old one at that. Sa'an looked into the woman's eyes and knew this was a fight she'd had her sword raised in favor of for more years than the younger girl would ever know. She knew that wherever this red priestess resides, the counterfeit prince would not be far behind.

Her comrades received her wordless signal to flee, a barrage of words she'd signed to them in their esoteric language with the hand she hid behind her back. They ran. And the red woman, spooked, saw Sa'an for what she was and had her arrested, maybe thinking having the evil enemy in close quarters was better than having her out and about, lurking. Working. Unseen. Like right now.

Sa'an stops to lean against a wooden door on the floor above the ground level. Lost in the shadow behind a banner sporting the crest of a crowned stag, she touches along her thigh, where her switchblade would normally be, then remembers they'd relieved her of all her weapons when they first imprisoned her. No matter. Her time in the Temple taught her many lessons. One of them is the ability to see a method of murder in nearly every object. She looks upon that banner with new eyes.

A pair of armed guards walk a patrol down the hall she hides in, one of them holding a lit torch. There is a breeze, one strategically aimed, and the torch goes out. A breath later, the guard on the left has a hastily-fashioned garrote around his neck, one made of the coarse, stringy fabric of the Baratheon banderole. Sa'an flexes her arms, pressing her back into his, and his neck snaps under her weight. His partner barely has a second to register what has happened before the short sword he has strapped to his hip plunges into the space between his chest plate and bevor. A spurt of blood from the slash in his neck sprays her face and stains her bared teeth. The attack takes all of a minute. And she's off again.

The thrill of the kill washes over her. The sense of a job well executed makes her head swim with delight. This was why she was born. This was why the slave traders sailed across the sea to one of the little islands in the Lysene archipelago, and laid waste to her hamlet. Why her merchant father and trader mother pulled every last coin from every last avenue they thought to pull it from, and sent their five daughters to the only place they thought they'd be safe: the west. Why her sisters, weak and desperate to live, died gruesomely, painfully. Why she alone lived.

The Mistress looked down upon Sa'an alone from the night sky and saw in her an opportunity. Something raw and special, something to be carved and cut and polished.

The Mistress knew once the time came, Sa'an alone would be able to recognize the face of the person the False Lord thought to bless, and rend them limb from limb. The Mistress knew Sa'an alone would look upon the face of Stannis Baratheon and wouldn't hesitate to send the same short sword she'd stolen off one of his men sailing through the air and into his heart before he even had a chance to see her slip from the shadows and into his council room.

Stannis, bearded and hard-faced, clad in the garb of a seasoned military man and would-be king, directs his stony gaze to the unremarkable hilt sticking out of his chest. Blood pours in waves from the stab wound, down the leathers of his clothes and dripping onto the stone floors. A line of it runs across the ground to stain the hem of his red witch's dress, a darker, almost black shade to contrast against her bright vermilion.

Her mouth gapes open as Sa'an walks over the bodies of the guards stationed outside the council room, and steps into the light. Stannis falls to his knees, dead.

"How..." The red woman looks down at the bleeding man at her foot, slack-jawed. In a faint voice, she says, "But he is the Prince that Was Promised."

Sa'an tosses the dagger she lifted from the guardsman outside into the air and catches it. Weighing it. Testing it. It too should fly well. "Now he is the Prince that Is Dead. Join him."

She winds her hand back and throws the dagger with a flick of her wrist. Her aim finds true in the red woman's skull, and she collapses to her knees as well.

Behind her, there is a rustle. Two sets of footsteps.

Ser Davos and Gendry both stagger at the entrance of the council room, wide-eyed and speechless, but not for long. The older of the men shoulders past where Sa'an is stationed near the ornate table in the middle of the room to the head of the thing, crouching down to cradle the body of the man long dead. Ser Davos gives a cry full of anguish. His body racked with sobs, his face twisted in a performance of the rawest kind of pain. Gendry remains where he is, staring.

Davos jerks up without warning, and draws a tiny little blade from a sheath hidden in the folds of his wool tunic. Brandishing it against Sa'an, he growls full of hate and hurt, "I knew I had to follow you. I knew you were up to no good!

Sa'an explains, and not for him, but for the boy standing behind her. The boy she's come to know as the back of her hand. The boy she's come to care for as she does her Mistress. "I had a mission sanctioned by the god superior to every other--"

"Shut yer trap, you evil little siren! There'll be none of that from you. No. No, I said!" His sword trembles in his grip. His face crumples in on itself, his expression of deep sadness evident. Sa'an looks within her heart and finds she feels nothing but impatience. Nothing but a worry Gendry would be the one to feel something. "You killed Stannis. Why would you do that?"

"He had to die. It was his destiny. And I had to be the one to kill him. It was mine."

"He was my friend!"

"He was a scourge. And now, I've freed the world. I'm a hero." She turns to look into Gendry's visage, white and stricken with fear. He still has not moved. "You have to understand. Please."

"Get a sword, Gendry." Davos grips his with both hands now. His tear-stained countenance hard as the stone ground he stands on, Sa'an sees resolution set into his features. "This girl is evil incarnate and she must be destroyed. She killed this man and this woman in cold blood, and she cannot be allowed to roam free. I, Ser Davos of the house Baratheon of Dragonstone, sentence you to die, girl. Gendry, now!"

Sa'an holds her breath. Davos raises his sword.

Gendry looks between them and the blade on the body of one of the fallen guards. He makes his decision.

**Author's Note:**

> As I stated in my previous work, my knowledge of the intricate goings on of the world of Game of Thrones is very limited, so don't at me 'cause basterd is spelt differently. Also, open endings are the very best and that's that on that.


End file.
